Biography Essay

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where she lived her entire life. The daughter of Eugene Mitchell, an attorney and president of the Atlanta Historical Society, she grew up surrounded by talk of the city and its central event: the fall to General Sherman's forces in 1864, which she was to re-create in Gone With the Wind (1936). She attended Smith College for one year, but the death of her mother required her to return home to manage the household of her father and older brother. Known as Peggy to her friends, she used the nickname when she began to write for the Atlanta Journal in 1922. In her four years as a newspaperwoman, she wrote 129 signed articles for the Sunday Journal Magazine, as well as many unsigned ones. These articles ranged from interviews with murderers, heiresses, and Rudolph Valentino to a series on Georgia's Confederate generals...